Visualizing ruins in an extinctive ocean

Abstract

This article submerges theory into the ocean in order to shed light on how the dissonance between lived experience and the epistemologically complex data of climate change can be culturally mediated to become a recognizable form of reinterpretation. By attentively and imaginatively situating critique in polluted milieux, this piece intends to close-read how photography, time lapse and slow-motion techniques might help us foreground the emergencies and environmental changes of the present by considering past experiences of extinction due to capitalist accumulation. That is, how these emergencies and multispecies injustices woven through the knots of life of the current epoch are portrayed, the political implications how they are presented and the contradictions that arise from them. This will be done by placing theory in the images presented in Chris Jordan’s Albatross (2017) and Jeff Orlowski & XL Catlin Seaview Survey’s Chasing Coral (2017). Finally, this text tries to exemplify how we might be living in the Necrocene, the age of extinction, which leaves nothing but ruins in its wake. In other words, this text aims to situate media, theory and ecology in a joint narrative while veering towards a critical and alternative nomenclature for our epoch.